“A bombing raid?” Milch laughed. “Even our longest-range bomber would barely make it there and back. And even if a few bombers did get there, enemy fighters would shoot them down before they could do any damage. No, I’m afraid you’d better think again on that one, Walter.”
“There is a plane that could do the job. The Focke Wulf FW 200 Condor.”
“That’s not a bomber, it’s a reconnaissance plane.”
“A long-range reconnaissance plane. I was thinking of four of them, each armed with two thousand-kilogram bombs. My team on the ground would knock out the enemy radar to give them a chance. Come on, Erhard, what do you say?”
Milch was shaking his head. “I don’t know.”
“They wouldn’t have to fly from Germany, but from German-held territory in the Ukraine. Vinnica. I’ve worked it out. From Vinnica it’s eighteen hundred kilometers to Teheran. There and back is just within the 200’s standard fuel range.”
“Actually it’s just outside, by forty-four kilometers,” said Milch. “The published figures on the 200’s range were inflated. Wrongly.”
“So they throw something out to save a bit of fuel.”
“One of the pilots, perhaps.”
“If necessary, yes. Or one of the pilots could take the place of the navigator.”
“Actually, I suppose that with overload fuel it might be possible to extend the range,” admitted Milch. “With a light bomb load, such as you describe, maybe. Perhaps.”
“Erhard, if we manage to kill the Big Three, we could force the Allies to the negotiating table. Think of it. Like Pearl Harbor. A decisive strike that completely changes the course of the war. Isn’t that what you said? And you’re right, of course. If we kill the Big Three there won’t be an Allied landing in Europe in ’44. Perhaps not at all. It’s that simple.”
“You know, things are not so good between myself and Goring right now, Walter.”
“I’d heard something.”
“He won’t be so easy to persuade.”
“What would you suggest?”
“That perhaps we should work around him. I’ll speak to Schmid at the Kurfurst.” Milch was referring to the intelligence arm of the Luftwaffe. “And to General Student in airborne.”
Schellenberg nodded: it was Student who had helped Skorzeny plan the air assault on the Hotel Campo Imperatore on the Gran Sasso in the Apennines.
“Then let’s drink to our plan,” said Milch and ordered another bottle of champagne.
“With your agreement, Erhard, I propose to call this plan of ours Operation Long Jump.”
“I like that. It has an appropriately athletic ring. Only this will have to be a world record, Walter. As if it were that black fellow from the last Olympiad in Berlin doing the long jumping.”
“Jesse Owens.”
“That’s the one. Marvelous athlete. When were you thinking of carrying out this operation of ours?”
Schellenberg unbuttoned his tunic pocket and took out his SS pocket diary. “This is the best part of the plan,” he grinned. “The part I haven’t yet told you about. Look here. I want to do this exactly eight weeks from tomorrow. On Tuesday, November thirtieth. At precisely nine P.M.”
“You’re very precise. I like that. But why that day in particular? And at that time?”
“Because on that day not only do I know that Winston Churchill will be in Teheran, I also happen to know that he’ll be hosting his own birthday party that night, at the British embassy in Teheran.”
“Was that also in agent Cicero’s information?”
“No. You see it’s obvious just from the location of this conference that the Americans are out to accommodate the Russians in whatever way they can. Why else would a president who is also a cripple be prepared to fly all that way? Now, that will discomfort the British, who, as the weakest of the three powers, will be looking for ways to try to control the situation. What better way to do it than to host a birthday party? To remind everyone that Churchill is the oldest of the three. And the longest-serving war leader. So the British will give a party. And everyone will drink to Churchill’s health and tell him what a great war leader he has been. And then a bomb from one of your airplanes will land on the embassy. Hopefully more than one bomb. And, if there is anyone left alive after that, my Waffen-SS team will finish them off.”
A waiter arrived with a second bottle of champagne, and as soon as it was open, Milch poured two glasses and raised his to Schellenberg. “Happy birthday, Mr. Churchill.”
IV
AMT VI (Department 6) of the SD had its offices in the southwest part of the city, in a curvilinear, four-story modern building. Constructed in 1930, it had been a Jewish old people’s home until October 1941, when all the residents were transferred directly to the ghetto at Lodz. Surrounded by vegetable gardens and blocks of apartments, only the flagpole on top of the roof and one or two official cars parked outside the front door gave any clue that 22 Berkaerstrasse was the headquarters of the Foreign Intelligence Section of the Reich Security Office.
Schellenberg liked being well away from his masters in the Wilhelmstrasse and on Unter den Linden. Berkaerstrasse, in Wilmersdorf, on the edge of the Grunewald Forest, was a good twenty-minute drive from Kaltenbrunner’s office, and this meant that he was usually left alone to do much as he pleased. But being alone in this way was not without its own peculiar disadvantage, insofar as Schellenberg was obliged to live and work among a group of men several of whom he considered, privately at least, to be dangerous psychopaths, and he was always wary of how he enforced discipline among his subordinate officers. Indeed, he had come to regard his colleagues much as a zookeeper in the reptile house at the Berlin Zoo might have regarded a pit full of alligators and vipers. Men who had killed with such alacrity and in such numbers were not to be trifled with.
Men like Martin Sandberger, Schellenberg’s second in command, who had recently arrived back in Berlin after leading a special action commando battalion in Estonia, where, it was bruited, his unit had murdered more than 65,000 Jews. Or Karl Tschierschky, who headed up Amt VI’s Group C, dealing with Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan, and who had been seconded to Schellenberg’s department with a similarly murderous background in Riga. Then there was Captain Horst Janssen, who had led a Sonderkommando in Kiev, executing 33,000 Jews. The plain fact of the matter was that Schellenberg’s department, much like any department in the SD, was thick with killers, some of whom were just as willing to kill a German as they had been to murder Jews. Albert Rapp, for example, another veteran of the special action groups and Tschierschky’s predecessor at the Turkish desk, had been killed in a hit-and-run accident. It was generally assumed Captain Reichert, another officer in Amt VI, was the driver. Reichert had become aware of a relationship between his wife and the late Albert Rapp: the baby-faced Captain Reichert did not look like a murderer, but then again, so few of them did.
Schellenberg himself had only escaped doing service in one of Heydrich’s murderous battalions by virtue of his precocious appointment as head of the SD’s Counterespionage/Inland Department in September 1939. Could he ever have murdered so many innocent people so very blithely? It was a question Schellenberg seldom asked himself, for the simple reason that he did not have an answer. Schellenberg subscribed to the view that a man did not really know what infamy he was capable of until he was actually required to do it.
Unlike most of his colleagues, Schellenberg had rarely fired a gun in anger; but concern for his own safety among so many proven murderers meant that he carried a Mauser in a shoulder holster, a C96 in his briefcase, a Schmeisser MP40 under the driver’s seat of his car, and two MP40s in his mahogany partner’s desk-one in each drawer. His precautions did not end there, however; underneath the blue stone on his gold signet ring was a cyanide capsule, while the windows of his top-floor office were sheathed in an electrically charged wire net that would sound an alarm if breached from the outside.